University‐Industry Relations at the Technological University of Compiègne

The system of university‐industry relations of the Technological University of Compiègne (UTC) is described. Since the founding of this institution in 1972, its provision of know‐how, services, and goods to the surrounding community has evolved into a very structured system. Representatives of the business community hold membership in all the decision‐making bodies of the University. Some of its components have formed a Law‐of‐1901 ‐type organization and others, a limited liability company, to provide services on either a non‐profit or a profit basis. The whole university and its components have formed the UTC Group. The result is described as a very successful symbiosis of a public institution and privatized components.     

Algebraic query optimization for distributed top-k queries

Distributed top-k query processing is increasingly becoming an essential functionality in a large number of emerging application classes. This paper addresses the efficient algebraic optimization of top-k queries in wide-area distributed data repositories where the index lists for the attribute values (or text terms) of a query are distributed across a number of data peers and the computational costs include network latency, bandwidth consumption, and local peer work. We use a dynamic programming approach to find the optimal execution plan using compact data synopses for selectivity estimation that is the basis for our cost model. The optimized query is executed in a hierarchical way involving a small and fixed number of communication phases. We have performed experiments on real web data that show the benefits of distributed top-k query optimization both in network resource consumption and query response time.     

Introduction to the reports of the work groups

I should like, in a few words, to introduce the philosophy and the general economics of this SEFI Conference and to offer you a few personal reflections on the choice of subjects for the work groups.     

Delineating complex scientific fields by an hybrid lexical-citation method: An application to nanosciences

Relevance of bibliometric indicators on scientific areas critically depends on the quality of their delineation. Macro-level studies, often based on a selected list of journals, accept a high degree of fuzziness. Micro-level studies rely on sets of individual articles in order to reduce noise and enhance precision of retrieval. The most usual information retrieval process is based on lexical queries with various levels of sophistication. In the experiment on Nanosciences reported here, this process was used as a first step, to delineate a ‘seed’ of literature. It has strong limitations, especially for emerging or transversal fields. In a second step, the alternative approach of citation linkages, was used to expand the bibliography starting from lexical seed. The extension process presented is ruled by three parameters, two deal with the cited side (threshold on citation score, and specificity towards the field), one with the citing side (threshold on the number of relevant references) interplaying in the ‘referencing structure’ function (RSF) introduced in a previous work. This type of combination proves effective for delineating the transversal field of Nanosciences. Further improvements of the method are discussed.     

A comparison of genetic variants between proficient low- and high-risk sport participants

Athletes participating in high-risk sports consistently report higher scores on sensation-seeking measures than do low-risk athletes or non-athletic controls. To determine whether genetic variants commonly associated with sensation seeking were over-represented in such athletes, proficient practitioners of high-risk (n = 141) and low-risk sports (n = 132) were compared for scores on sensation seeking and then genotyped at 33 polymorphic loci in 14 candidate genes. As expected, athletes participating in high-risk sports score higher on sensation seeking than did low-risk sport athletes (P < .01). Genotypes were associated with high-risk sport participation for two genes (stathmin, (P = .004) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (P = .03)) as well as when demographically matched subsets of the sport cohorts were compared (P < .05); however, in all cases, associations did not survive correction for multiple testing.     

Strong similarity measures for ordered sets of documents in information retrieval

A general method is presented to construct ordered similarity measures (OS-measures), i.e., similarity measures for ordered sets of documents (as, e.g., being the result of an IR-process), based on classical, well-known similarity measures for ordinary sets (measures such as Jaccard, Dice, Cosine or overlap measures). To this extent, we first present a review of these measures and their relationships.The method given here to construct OS-measures extends the one given by Michel in a previous paper so that it becomes applicable on any pair of ordered sets. Concrete expressions of this method, applied to the classical similarity measures, are given.Some of these measures are then tested in the IR-system Profil-Doc. The engine SPIRIT^© extracts ranked document sets in three different contexts, each for 550 requests. The practical usability of the OS-measures is then discussed based on these experiments.